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Comment by pkulak | Hacker News Reader

It amazes me that this language was supposedly written to be the groundwork for an entirely new html engine and yet there has never been a really nice HTTP library; built in or third party. Look at some of the last language hype parties: Node and Go; they both didn't even hit alpha stage before they had fantastic HTTP/networking libraries built in.

I get that Rust is targeting low-level, "systems" programming, but I really don't see how you can't also be a very performant server language.

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libgreen/libnative (the modern Rust I/O story) have only existed for a few months. The focus was on the language before the I/O runtime, as the entire runtime is written in the language.

  > they both didn't even hit alpha stage before they had 
  > fantastic HTTP/networking libraries

Rust is not yet alpha. It's still pre-alpha.

In fairness though, it's very unlikely that Rust will be distributing an official HTTP library by 1.0 - it's a big, difficult, library, the type which deserves to prove itself in for awhile before settling on. For these types of libs my planned trajectory is to integrate with Servo, make them installable via the package manager, let them stew in the wild until we're confident, then 'flip a switch' and declare them official.

Given that people are working on a high quality package manager, what do you gain when you "flip the switch" and make it official, rather than just having it be the most used HTTP package?

You don't gain much at that point, and that's the aim: a process that allows the best libraries to smoothly progress from community projects to official components, without any major disruptive events along the way.

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